iPod loaded horn boosts your tunes

The Griffin AirCurve Dock is a nifty gadget that uses a coiled horn to increase the volume of your iPhone’s speaker. Griffin’s marketing claims that their passive device delivers “amazing amplification” and “you’ll swear there are full-sized speakers in there.” Meh. It does look like an interesting project for someone with a 3D printer. You could experiment with different passage and dock shapes. At least it gives us an excuse to post two massive DIY horns.

Above is “THE BIGGEST SUB HORN OF THE WORLD”, created by the guys at Royal Device. This massive subwoofer and horn is claimed to have bandwidth below 10Hz, and produce 100dB at only 1 Watt of input power. The sub construction is built under the listening room. The speakers (16 of them) are rated for a total power of 6400 watts.

The Kleinhorn is set more in reality. These Baltic birch horns are loaded with Lowther DX-55’s. The horns are about 11 feet long, and were built in sections to make it easy to modify the damping and so you could get them through a door. Our table saws are already itching for some action.

i can’t find a link, but herrington or hammacher schlemmer or one of those ‘fancy stuff’ catalogs had this gramophone-styled ceramic horn amplifier that you set your earbud headphones on and supposedly provided pretty significant projection.

i remember reading somewhere that inaudible low-frequency sound was experimented with as a means of crowd control or even a lethal weapon. supposedly it makes people extremely nauseous, and at high enough power could theoretically rupture internal organs.

Correct on the experiments with sound. They had “the brown noise” which made you have to take a poo… and when i have subs rumbling in my car, it does work, but not to the degree they would like. And technically you could create a sound wave “loud” enough to stop your heart, basically like a controlled directed explosion… you die from the blast wave next to a huge bomb, not from shrapnal or fire… just the sheer force on your body… but to direct that and reproduce it, requires too much energy and cannot be focused well enough, so alas it is a failure… but to stop your heart… you can technically buy subs on the car audio market that will do that. but to find the right sound/series of sounds to do so would require much research.

ps: always a fan of excellent acoustics. just living proof that a concert is only as good as the space/room it is set in.

This takes me back.. as a teenager a group of my friends discovered that by curling your hand into a particular horn shape (make a tight circle with your pinky, larger circle with your third finger etc) you could make the speakers on phones about twice as loud, a trick I still pull out occasionally.

As for the brick sub-floor horn… I’d love to hear that one in action. I wonder how it compares to that variable-pitch-fan subwoofer that they claimed would go down to 0Hz?

@ andy
I heard about that, but there was nothing magic in the waves. It was just a very directional, very loud, siren designed to breach the threshold of pain for their hearing. If a band of deaf pirates were to attack, they would be none the wiser.